The emergence of a
durable Palestinian nationalism was one of the more remarkable developments in
the history of the modern Middle East in the second half of the 20th
century. This was largely due to a generation of young activists who proved
particularly adept at capturing the public imagination, and at seizing
opportunities to develop autonomous political institutions and to promote their
cause regionally and internationally. Their principal vehicle was the Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO), while armed struggle, both as practice and as
doctrine, was their primary means of mobilizing their constituency and
asserting a distinct national identity. By the end of the 1970s a majority of
countries – starting with Arab countries, then extending through the Third World
and the Soviet bloc and other socialist countries, and ending with a growing
number of West European countries – had recognized the PLO as the legitimate
representative of the Palestinian people. The United Nations General Assembly meanwhile
confirmed the right of the stateless Palestinians to national
self-determination, a position adopted subsequently by the European Union and
eventually echoed, in the form of support for Palestinian statehood, by the
United States and Israel from 2001 onwards.
None of this was a
foregone conclusion, however. Britain had promised to establish a Jewish
‘national home’ in Palestine when it seized the country from the Ottoman Empire in 1917,
without making a similar commitment to the indigenous Palestinian Arab
inhabitants. In 1929 it offered them the opportunity to establish a
self-governing agency and to participate in an elected assembly, but their
community leaders refused the offer because it was conditional on accepting
continued British rule and the establishment of the Jewish ‘national home’ in
what they considered their own homeland. The Palestinians therefore lacked the
experience of self-government and state-building by the time the British mandate
came to a precipitate end in May 1948, and such political and military
institutions as they had crumbled in the face of an offensive by Zionist forces
with superior numbers, arms, training, and organization. In the course of the
conflict that gave birth to the State of Israel, some 750,000 Palestinians, or
60-65 percent of the Arab population, fled or were expelled from their homes,
to become permanent refugees in those parts of Palestine that had not been
incorporated into Israel or in neighbouring Arab countries.
After 1948 the
scattered Palestinian communities found themselves under diverse systems of
administration, whether political, legal, or economic. Egypt placed the 300,000 Palestinians crowded into the tiny
Gaza
Strip under
military administration, while Jordan annexed the West Bank and its 800,000
residents in an ‘act of union’ that was not recognized by any other country,
but which ensured the gradual conferment of Jordanian citizenship on them. Some
100,000 Palestinian refugees in Syria enjoyed all rights enjoyed by Syrian
nationals except the right to run for public office and vote, whereas Lebanon denied a similar number all political rights and severely restricted their civil
rights as well. In Israel itself the 150,000 Palestinians who had remained
behind formed a small minority and were granted citizenship, but were kept under
martial law until 1966 and suffered de facto second-class political and legal
status afterwards. In all cases, the loss of land and other immovable assets,
disruption of social and commercial networks and labour markets, and exclusion
from political and administrative power pauperized and stigmatized most Palestinian
refugees, leaving them heavily dependent on
UN-organized
relief and on onward
migration and subject to economic and social marginality in host countries.
The searing
experience of the exodus of 1948 provided a cradle for the growth of a shared Palestinian
nationalism, but the aftermath of geographic dispersal and diversity in living
conditions and host systems initially impeded it. Most refugees pinned their
hopes for repatriation and restitution on Arab governments, especially on the
immensely popular
Colonel Gamal Abdul-Nasser, who
overthrew the Egyptian monarchy in July 1952 and promised to defeat Israel. In the following years, the Palestinian issue became a pawn in inter-Arab
rivalries, often-cited but rarely pursued with vigour.
It was in this
climate that the forerunners of the PLO took shape, small groups of political
activists and self-styled “liberators” who sought the restoration of Arab
Palestine, through war and the destruction of Israel. Most important of these
were two: the
Movement of Arab Nationalists, which sought pan-Arab unity
as a means of marshalling sufficient military and economic power to defeat
Israel and confront its Western backers, and consequently adopted Nasser as its
moral and political guide; and the
Palestinian
National Liberation Movement (best known by its reverse Arabic acronym Fatah), which
resented what it saw as Arab ‘tutelage’ over the Palestine issue and planned to
launch its own armed liberation struggle independently of the Arab states.
The charismatic
appeal of Nasser on the one hand, and the surveillance of Palestinian political
activity by host governments and security services on the other, dissuaded many
Palestinians from joining the new groups or engaging in independent military
activity until the mid-1960s. As Palestinians became increasingly restless in
the face of evident Arab inaction, however, Nasser took the lead in endorsing
the initiative of a Palestinian lawyer and diplomat,
Ahmad al-Shuqayri, to set up
the PLO as a nationally-representative umbrella organization for the
Palestinians in
May 1964. Nasser’s
support ensured collective recognition by the Arab governments of the PLO,
which was invited to join the League of Arab States and allowed to form a small
“liberation army” with units based in the Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip, Syria
and Iraq. Jordan, which continued to press its claim of sovereignty over the
West Bank and representation of its Palestinian population, grudgingly recognized the PLO
but refused to host its army.
The
establishment of the PLO posed a
dilemma for the small, independent groups, which had yet to assert themselves
in public or win a mass following. Fatah, which was ultimately to assert its brand
of Palestinian nationalism and to dominate the PLO and Palestinian politics
until the early 21st century, felt the challenge most acutely in the
mid-1960s. It regarded the PLO as a compliant tool of the Arab states, intended
to contain growing Palestinian activism and dissipate demands for immediate
military action against Israel. A fundamental tenet of its faith was that the
Arab states had aborted Palestinian national aspirations by opposing the
formation of a Palestinian provisional government in response to the UN
Partition Plan of November 1947, in the dying days of the British mandate, and
by preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state in the remaining areas
of the country after the 1948 war. Fatah therefore determined to launch its
armed struggle without further delay, as a means of regaining the initiative
and setting the national agenda.
Fatah was far from
ready for sustained military activity: it had few trained volunteers and even
fewer serviceable arms, and its initial raids against targets in northern Israel
were ineffective. For two years its fate hung in the balance. Nasser regarded it as
a band of agents provocateurs sponsored by his rivals in the leftwing military
faction of the Ba’th Party that governed Syria, with the purpose of provoking
Israel and dragging Egypt into a war for which it was not prepared. Warrants were issued for the
arrest of Fatah members in Gaza and other Arab states; the Syrians themselves
distrusted Fatah, suspecting it of links to Egypt and the outlawed Muslim
Brothers, and arrested several of its leaders on more than one occasion. Yet
the example of Fatah’s pinprick guerrilla attacks on Israel was attracting a
growing number of young Palestinians and prompting the creation of additional guerrilla
groups, and even goaded the pro-Nasser Movement of Arab Nationalists into
preparing its own military campaign.
As was to happen
at several key junctures in modern Palestinian history, external events stepped
in to transform the fortunes of Fatah, the other nascent guerrilla groups, and
the PLO. On
5 June 1967, Israel launched a surprise
attack on the armed forces of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, following Nasser’s decision to
withdraw a UN buffer force from the Sinai Peninsula and to blockade all
shipping to or from the Israeli port of Eilat at the Straits of Tiran. Israel
achieved a stunning victory over the next six days, in the course of which it seized Sinai,
the Syrian Golan Heights, and the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip.
While the Arab governments and armies reeled from the debacle, their political
authority and military reputation shattered, Fatah announced the start of an
insurrectionary campaign inside the newly-occupied territories. This proved to
be a resounding failure from an operational point of view, but a success
politically. Fatah had provided an example of defiance in the midst of defeat,
which Arabs everywhere, but Palestinians most of all, desperately needed. The
critical moment came on
21 March 1968, when an
Israeli armoured column crossed the Jordan River under heavy fire from the
Jordanian Army, to destroy guerrilla bases in and around the Palestinian
refugee camp of
Karameh. The
Movement of Arab Nationalists (now renamed the
Popular
Front for the Liberation of Palestine – PFLP) opted
prudently to withdraw before battle, but Fatah decided to stay put. It lost
two-thirds of its fida’iyin – ‘men of sacrifice’ – but reaped an
enormous harvest as thousands of volunteers, inspired by its astute
self-portrayal as the victor, flocked to guerrilla training camps.
The myth of the
heroic guerrilla was born, and with it the mystique of armed struggle. Within
months, the various guerrilla groups had taken collective control of the PLO’s
‘parliament-in-exile’, the Palestine National Council (PNC), with Fatah
occupying the largest single bloc of seats. In
February
1969 the
revamped PNC elected an Executive Committee wholly dominated by the guerrilla
groups, and chose Fatah leader
Yasser Arafat
as its
Chairman, a role he was to occupy until his death in November 2004. The guerrilla
groups meanwhile expanded their military presence in the Jordan Valley and in
the northern and southern border areas of Jordan, and established militia units
and a range of recruiting, supply, administrative and public relations offices
in the kingdom’s refugee camps and parts of the capital Amman and other cities.
A similar process occurred in Syria, where the ruling Ba’th Party established
its own guerrilla group, Vanguards of Popular Liberation War (best known as
Sa’iqa -- Thunderbolt), and supported the establishment of guerrilla bases in
south Lebanon. By 1969-1970, the guerrilla groups were launching 20-30 attacks
a day against targets inside Israel and the territories it had occupied in June
1967.
These were halcyon
days, but guerrilla power had already peaked. A growing proportion of attacks
took the form of cross-border fire, as Israel reinforced border security and
made infiltration ever more costly, and as it developed its intelligence
capabilities and rolled up Palestinian secret networks in the occupied
territories. Guerrilla cross-border incursions
drew increasingly severe Israeli counter-fire and retaliatory air raids, which
variously targeted the armed forces and economic infrastructure of the host
Arab governments or their civilian populations. Israeli strategy was designed
both to drive a wedge between the guerrillas and host populations, who were
driven in growing numbers from border areas to seek refuge in main cities, and
to coerce host governments into repressing the guerrillas. At the same time, indiscipline
was rife among the many guerrilla groups and their members and supporters in
the main cities. Bitter memories of political repression and imprisonment
before the 1967 war, combined with a largely inchoate class resentment, fuelled
open defiance of government authority even in the conduct of civil duties,
demonstrations of armed strength, and, on the Palestinian left, public calls
for social revolution and the overthrow of ‘reactionary’ Arab governments.
Nonetheless, the guerrillas
remained widely popular throughout the Arab world and enjoyed the support of
Nasser, who now viewed them as a useful ally in his war of attrition against
Israeli forces along the Suez Canal. The Jordanian, Syrian, and Lebanese governments
therefore refrained from confronting the guerrillas directly, and instead
concluded various protocols with the PLO regulating guerrilla activity, both
military and civilian. The PLO proved unable to impose its will on the unruly guerrilla
movement, however: some groups openly rejected its authority, and Fatah refused
to instil discipline by force. Finally, after repeated skirmishes in 1969-1970,
King Hussein sent the Jordanian army into Amman and the main cities and refugee
camps in September 1970 to disarm the guerrillas and their civilian militias
and reassert government control. ‘
Black September’, as the
PLO dubbed the showdown, demonstrated the unwillingness of its backers in Syria
and Iraq to intervene in its defence. With the sudden
death of Nasser of cardiac
arrest and the replacement of leftwing allies in Syria and Iraq by more pragmatic leaders,
the PLO was too weak to resist the Jordanian Army’s strategy of
gradual encirclement, and by July 1971 it had been expelled from the kingdom. Although the documents within the present collection
stop in 1970, it is useful to continue the narrative up to the present day.
In Syria the new President Hafez Asad strictly curtailed guerrilla activity and
PLO privileges, while similar attempts in Lebanon in 1973 and 1975 led to the
breakdown of the state and army amidst a civil war that was to endure through
successive phases until 1990.
The defeat in Jordan spelled the end of the Palestinian armed struggle as a practical strategy and as a
mobilizing discourse, although the rhetoric and imagery were to survive for
years. The loss of the principal PLO sanctuary was moreover compounded by the
decisive defeat of underground resistance networks in the occupied territories.
The dominant PLO group, Fatah, initially responded to the strategic predicament
by resorting to international terrorism through a front group called the Black
September Organization, whose most notorious action was the murder of 11
Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in September 1972. This built on the
precedent set by the PFLP, which had hijacked several Israeli and Western
airliners between 1968 and 1970, and whose open flouting of Jordanian sovereignty
provided the immediate pretext for King Hussein’s crackdown. By 1973 Fatah had
called a halt to terrorism, and prevailed upon the PFLP to do the same, as it
sought to develop international backing for its cause. In parallel, it
exploited the vulnerability of the leftist guerrilla groups that had done so
much to precipitate the September 1970 showdown in Jordan, in order to assert
the PLO conclusively as the guerrilla movement’s governing body and higher
authority.
The end of the
armed struggle was most clearly embodied in a fundamental shift in PLO strategy
and objectives from 1973 onwards. This followed the partial victory of the
Egyptian and Syrian armies during the October 1973 war, and the deployment of
the Arab ‘oil weapon’ in the form of an embargo on exports to the US and West
European states. In the aftermath the PLO won unanimous recognition of its
much-coveted status as sole, legitimate representative of the Palestinians from
the Arab states (including a reluctant Jordan), the members of the Non-Aligned
Movement, and the Soviet bloc and other socialist countries. The quid pro quo
was its willingness, albeit implicitly at first, to reach a historic compromise
with Israel through negotiations that would lead to the creation of a
Palestinian state in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. The new approach was articulated in a ‘ten-point program’ approved by the
PNC in June 1974.
The PLO had not
abandoned military means, but from now on its armed forces served more limited aims:
protection of its new sanctuary in Lebanon (especially from attack by Maronite
Christian militias and allied factions in the Lebanese Army in 1975-1976),
projection of a state-like image, and maintenance of pressure on Israel. Its forces received conventional training and armament in this period, transforming
them from guerrilla formations into regular brigades and battalions backed by
heavy artillery and WWII-vintage tanks. These were of limited combat
effectiveness, but served to reinforce PLO ties with Soviet bloc and socialist
countries, which gave assistance, and with Third World countries that in turn
received military assistance from the PLO. This network of ties translated into
support at the UN, which the PLO had come to regard as a main arena of
diplomatic action.
PLO transition to
a primarily diplomatic strategy was by no means painless or bloodless. The PFLP
led other, lesser militant groups in forming a ‘rejectionist front’ to counter
what it saw as capitulation by the Fatah-dominated PLO and surrender of
historic rights to the whole of Palestine. Syria, Iraq, and the USSR similarly suspected the PLO of seeking to join a US-sponsored peace process, and
subjected it to sustained pressure; numerous PLO officials were assassinated by
the Iraqi-sponsored ‘Abu Nidal’ group in the late 1970s. Reading the writing on
the wall, Arafat demurred when invited by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to
join the Camp David talks with Israel and seek Palestinian autonomy in
1977-1979. By then the rightwing nationalist Likud Party had come to power in Israel; not only was it committed to colonizing the entire ‘Land of Israel’ with Jews, but it
concluded that the defeat of Palestinian nationalism in the occupied
territories required destruction of the PLO base in Lebanon. It ordered the
invasion of Lebanon in June 1982 and forced the evacuation of the PLO from its
headquarters in the capital, Beirut, after a gruelling three-month siege that
left 12,000-18,000 dead Palestinians and Lebanese, civilians in the great majority.
The exile of the bulk of PLO military and civilian personnel to far-flung camps
and offices around the Arab world demonstrated with finality the end of the
military option. It also triggered a deep split within Fatah and a brief civil
war between PLO forces loyal to Arafat and opponents allied with Syria.
The decade that
followed witnessed political drift and bitter infighting, as loyalist and
dissident PLO groups struggled for the allegiance of the Palestinian public. It
also witnessed the ‘camp wars’, in which pro-Syrian shi’a Muslim militias in
Lebanon subjected Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut and the south to a cruel siege in order to
prevent a return of PLO power. Salvation came abruptly to the PLO when the
occupied territories erupted in an initially spontaneous and unarmed popular
revolt against Israeli control in December 1987. The PLO basked in its newfound
limelight, and Arafat used the fillip to obtain PNC approval of his formal
condemnation of terrorism and recognition of Israel’s right to exist, and so
won an official dialogue with the US Administration, for the first time ever.
This laid the basis for the PLO’s eventual conduct of secret talks in the
Norwegian capital, Oslo, with representatives of the Israeli government that
came to power under the Labour Party in June 1992. The ‘Oslo Accords’ published
in September 1993 offered mutual recognition between the PLO and Israel, and
allowed the PLO to establish a governing Palestinian Authority in parts of the
Gaza Strip and West Bank from May 1994 onwards.
In retrospect, the
armed struggle had allowed the founders of Fatah, the PFLP, and other guerrilla
groups to achieve mass mobilization among the scattered Palestinians and to
integrate them politically into the single, over-arching national framework of
the PLO as a state-in-exile. It enabled them to carve out a measure of
institutional autonomy in the Arab state system at an opportune moment in the
late 1960s, and to preserve that niche thereafter despite suffering severe
setbacks. Armed struggle moreover gave rise to a new political system, through
which competing guerrilla groups and political factions could promote their
agendas and acquire influence in accordance with commonly-understood ‘rules of
the game’. In the process, Fatah succeeded
in asserting its brand of pragmatic, state-centred nationalism that emphasized
the establishment of a political and institutional identity distinct from Arab
counterparts, even if this meant accepting a territorial compromise with Israel
that would leave the Palestinians with a mere 22 percent of mandate Palestine.
Alternative nationalist discourses associated with pan-Arabism or the ‘total’ liberation
of Palestine and unrelenting war with Israel were marginalized, although a new
breed of Islamist groups – Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad – revived the
discourse of ‘armed resistance’ from the mid-1980s onwards.
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